Month: June 2017

There isn’t a Wordbound prompt this week, which was great because I decided to participate in reading bingo, in which you have to read books that meet certain criteria depicted on a bingo board. I finished my three books to get a bingo yesterday, so now I’m on book number four and on my way to a double bingo. As much as I love writing, it was nice to have an excuse to just sit and read instead. I haven’t been reading much lately, but I realized how much I missed it, and I want to make more time for it.

Other than that I haven’t done much this week. I didn’t do much writing this week other than finishing a short story. As usual, I got a bit sidetracked on the story I’ve been working on because I was trying to figure out every little detail before writing, which means no actual writing gets done. So this week I’m not allowing any more distractions and I’m going to really get into writing this draft. There are some pretty important things that I do need to figure out, but they won’t come up for a few chapters, so I have some time.

I think that’s it for this week. I wanted to come up with something to actually write about here, but this will have to be good enough. I’ve got a lot of other stuff I need to be working on right now and I’m sure there will be a longer/better post next week. Honestly, I just feel a bit exhausted right now and just want to curl up and watch a silly movie, so I think that’s what I’ll do.

This week’s Wordbound prompt is: Include a mirror as an integral part of your scene. I started a short story inspired by an episode of Charmed and the thoughts I have every day wondering what would be going on right now if Hillary Clinton was president.

An Excerpt

Melinda arrived home and sat her bags on the kitchen counter. She hung up her keys, slipped off her shoes, and unpacked her groceries. And that’s when she heard the voice coming from the other room.

“Hello?” the voice said. Melinda froze. Then she heard it again. She picked up a knife and held it out in front of her before walking into her bedroom. She didn’t see anyone. Then she heard the voice again, from behind her. She spun around and saw what, at first, she thought was her reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall. Until she realized that the woman staring back at her was wearing different clothes and didn’t move at the same time she did.

“You don’t need the knife,” the woman in the mirror said, “I can’t come over there. I tried.”

“That’s not creepy at all,” Melinda said. But she lowered the knife.

They stared at each other.

“What is this?” Melinda asked, “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” the woman in the mirror said, “I walked into my bedroom earlier and I realized that I couldn’t see my reflection. I looked closer and I noticed that what I was seeing wasn’t an exact reflection of my bedroom. It was my room, but there were things that were a little bit off. I kept watching, but nothing happened. Then I heard you.”

Melinda walked over to the mirror and held up her hand. She touched the mirror, half-expecting her hand to slip through it, but it was just normal glass. The woman in the mirror stood back, watching her.

“Why is this happening?” Melinda whispered to herself, “Am I going crazy?”

“I’ve felt like I’ve been going crazy since November,” the woman in the mirror said, “Maybe I’ve finally snapped.”

I didn’t do much writing yet this week, but I planned on making today a writing day. There are a couple chapters at the beginning of my story that should be pretty short, so I should be able to get at least one chapter done today. I haven’t written much this month in general, but I’m planning on working a lot this week.

This week’s Wordbound prompt was: Make three writing related confessions.

I don’t think I’ve shared any of my writing with anyone outside of this project, school, and that brief period I dabbled in writing fanfiction.

I desperately need a job, but I don’t know where to start outside of writing. It’s the only thing I know I want to do and I’d much rather be at home writing than working somewhere else. It isn’t why I don’t have a job (I’d take almost anything at this point), but it would be nice to have something else that I knew I wanted to do that I could work toward.

I made a goal awhile ago to start trying to get something published when I was 25, which means I have a little over a year to get something to the point that I’m ready to share it. I doubt I’ll have something done well enough by that time and sometimes I think I should wait longer and give myself more time to allow my writing to improve, but I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll just keep putting it off and never publish anything.

Writing Goal Updates

I didn’t do much actual writing this week, but I finished my outline to the point that I should be ready to start writing the next draft of my story. I don’t like doing too much outlining because I tend to get distracted trying to figure out every little detail and it takes way too long and I never start writing, but I needed to do some outlining for this.

Basically, I had several separate stories that I planned to intertwine and I thought it would be easier to write a rough draft of each story first, and then bring them all together. I finished the drafts of these stories, so then I had to smash them together. I had to figure out the timeline and where each story would intersect with the others and make sure I didn’t have an overlapping character in two places at once. It’s still a very basic outline, but it shows the entire story in chronological order, so I’m ready to start from the beginning and write the whole thing. This is the most excited I’ve been about a writing project in a long time and I’m so happy to finally feel like I’m making progress.

This week was rough. I don’t want to go into the details, but there are parts of my life that I’m not very happy with and right now I don’t have the means to change them. I’m working on it, but it will take some time. So, for now, I just have to try to make the best of the situation.

For a long time, I’d been very unfocused in my writing. I’d scribble down an idea when it popped into my head and then work on it for a bit until the next idea came along and then I would move on. So at the beginning of the year, I decided to narrow my focus and work on three different projects. My two favorites that I’ve stuck with the longest, and a third that was meant to be the comic relief if I got tired of the drama of the other two. But it quickly became apparent that the third project just wasn’t going to work. I just couldn’t focus on something that was solely meant to be upbeat and happy and ignorant of the problems of the world. Eventually, in my determination to actually finish something, I decided to focus only on a story I’ve been writing about superheroes.

It was obvious why that story spoke to me the most. Every day a new, terrifying news story comes out and it’s hard to focus on anything else. I couldn’t write that happy story when I felt like the world was crumbling around me. But I could write about people trying to fix the world’s problems. I think we could all use some superheroes to believe in right now.

I went to see Wonder Woman today and I realized why this story had become so important to me. For the two hours I sat in that theater, I actually got to take a break from everything and see a glimpse of hope. There are a lot of terrible things going on in the world right now, but there are also a lot of people fighting for good. And that’s the story I need to be writing. I need to see the superheroes fighting to change the world.

I didn’t write much this week, but I feel more determined than ever to continue this story and, eventually, share it.